Photos and feature by E.R. Pulgar
For someone who has two left feet compared to every Venezuelan I’ve ever met, most of my formative memories—and, later, some of my most important adult experiences—happened on a dance floor. Watching family members entwining themselves in each other around a dance floor, around our living room at Christmas, as a gaita or a salsa or a merengue set the stage, was always beautiful and terrifying to me until I started getting the courage to learn.
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Growing up in Miami meant perreo was an education all its own. It wasn’t a middle school dance without Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”, without Wisin y Yandel’s “Rakata”. Before any of us even knew what sex was, we learned to move our bodies to the rhythm of each other, early sweat on our brows dripping onto each other. I wasn’t usually involved, chalk it up to a mixture of fear of fucking up, the growing pains of puberty, and the fact that if someone caught my attention, dancing was never the way I let them know until much later.
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I remember loving how deliciously disgusting the lyrics were, even if they used to make me gasp—run Calle 13 classic “Atrevete-Te-Te” through Google Translate and you’ll blush at best. There’s something primal about a reggaeton beat, something animalistic that comes out of us con cada perreito, but I’ve always been someone to look at what the music meant. I never truly convinced myself about the lyric world perreo lives in, but that beat is undeniable.
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That early perreo and the way it rolled off our tongues and young bodies with such ease. It was easy, pretending to know what we were doing and figuring it out inside the body roll of another person.
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Those lovers who you don’t forget because they hold you to the beat the way someone else did. Distinguish them by the way they look, by the way they look at you.
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The dance critic and poet Edwin Denby said that “there is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.”
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Human connection and the way it comes forth, from locking eyes with the right person at the right time or smelling like sweat and good cologne or whispering the right thing into someone’s ear. A new language forms, sometimes without saying anything at all. You learn to say the things you can’t when you’re out together with someone, cheek to cheek, nose to nose, face to face, lips just barely brushing.
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Have you ever kissed someone on a dance floor surrounded by people? I mean really kissed someone? Like felt your bones quake when they hold the small of your back? Like touching foreheads and locking eyes like the person in front of you is any different from onlookers? They are, in that moment.
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The eye stare is important in tango. You show up a stranger and pick your partner with the stare. Hunting for intimacy by the book until they’re in your arms. This isn’t the dance’s only secret language—the way Argentinians sometimes turn a phrase will confuse other Spanish speakers. This is lunfardo, pibes, born of the same brothels where tango first took root, and injected into the language itself as even the higher classes started catching onto the romance that can only be found at a milonga.
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Stuffy European courts with their rules and consequences, gloved hands circling the golden rooms. Intimacy meant something different then. A glove or the right show of thigh among the ceremonials could land you on the roof of the Petit Trianon in the arms of the wrong person, watching exactly the right sunset.
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That scene in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette where they run off to a party at the Palais Garnier and it’s soundtracked by Siouxie and the Banshees “Hong Kong Garden” and everyone twirls in the glistening main room like it’s the most intensely beautiful mosh pit you’ve ever seen and ends with a sunrise carriage ride to Versailles.
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You feel lost and party. You feel found and party. You feel alone and party. You feel in community and party. You fail and party. You win and party. You get invited to a party and party. You get thrown out of a party and party. You have nothing to do and party. You have way too much to do and party. You’re heartbroken and party. You’re madly in love and you party.
You stay out until 5AM and go to work the next morning, somehow still relatively on time.
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Bad Bunny’s “Solo De Mi” came out shortly after I was going through a breakup with someone who willingly described themselves as a dollar-store Troye Sivan. I’m not saying I make good decisions, but I’m saying Benito and I share the same sun sign, and that there’s something to his music that speaks to queer melancholia and to sadness in general. The piano at the beginning, the way he drones his way to independence to the tune of a downbeat bass, the way the song builds into an intense end that’s more in the vein of the Bad Bunny we’ve come to know, the party after days of feeling sorry for yourself in bed. ”Yo no soy tuyo ni de nadie / yo soy solo de mi”—I don’t belong to you or to anyone / I only belong to myself.
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“I’m almost crying right now talking about my DJ, honestly. That question you asked me made me sentimental. I’m very sentimental and I think it comes with being a Pisces. I think there is something about that sign where the water just comes out.” — Bad Bunny to Rosalía for Interview Magazine
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Max with the green eyes. Max with the tight grip. Max holding me under blue light. Max doing poppers under purple light. Max holding the stereo as the bass drones. Max asking to go home with me. Max holding my hand as I lead him to the back room where the DJ is blasting Ms. Nina and Tomasa del Real. Max kissing me like a treasure long forgotten. Max being pushed against the wall by my lips as the room surges with other bodies. Max with a Daddy. Max with a boyfriend. Max with me, under blue and purple strobe lights.
Y dime
Si tu quieres
Yo te presto
Mi amor
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I’ve had my biggest revelations on a dance floor alone. The bass whispers things to me, the constant industrial chug of the drum machine lets me know it’s ok to flail and to move my hands and stretch every bit of my body as long as I do not stop.
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One night I didn’t feel like dancing but my friends coaxed me out of staying in reading by promising to pay my cover. I put on an all white outfit and went out into the cold Brooklyn air. I got to the club and fished for my wallet in my jacket pocket, only to find the book I was going to spend all night reading, packed in a rush and stuffed next to a lighter and some gum. My copy of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada remains a bit in tatters, but I leaf through and can’t help but feel glad it was with me.
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Aguas arriba, en medio de las olas externas,
tu paralelo cuerpo se sujeta en mis brazos
como un pez infinitamente pegado a mi alma
rápido y lento en la energía subceleste.
— Pablo Neruda, “Poema 10” | Veinte poemas de amor y una canción (1924)
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I remember almost moving to a commune on Staten Island because they lived in a refurbished 18th century mansion and the rent was cheap. I went with a friend, in case any shady shit was up. I was met by a community of writers, actors, bikers, art activists, and crystal healers from South Africa. We drank and ate an afternoon away—after much prompting, I was chosen as the DJ because I “worked in music”. By the end of the night we were all dancing tango and salsa, but I started easy, looking at the music that’s never failed to move a crowd or soundtrack a party. Of course, I looked to Miami, to Berlin, and to Ibiza.
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EXCERPT: TRANSCRIPT OF ANNA MARIA RICCO’S INTERVIEW FOR SOULWAX’S “CLOSE TO PARADISE”
My name is Anna Maria
And I was here
Sometime in ‘83
On holiday
And then I decide to stay
Forever!
In Spanish
It’s “Anna Maria
Noche y Día”.
It means
“Anna Maria Day and Night”
Because I was everywhere.
I don’t want to lose one minute
Of this party
Or in the beach
In the discotheques.
I was sleeping nothing
Just a few hours sometimes
When my body was going to die.
I was in after hours party
At a villa
And with table glass I cut my feet
And got transferred to a kind of hospital
Because there wasn’t a hospital in Ibiza
Only Cruz Roja.
Then when In Italy
When I went to Italy
The doctor said
I won’t walk well anymore,
So I decided to become
A gogo dancer.
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My friend Brock and I never quite talked in-depth about our mutual obsession with David Bowie, despite both of us knowing that the other one shared that preternatural connection to the Starman. It wasn’t until a house party we both found ourselves at where we excuse ourselves to his apartment—conveniently one floor down—to pour out the last of the tequila and take a break from everyone upstairs. When the topic of Bowie came up, I admitted that my favorite would always be The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Brock twirled a bit in his black evening gown, shot back the tequila, and shot me a look before putting on “Moonage Daydream”. We were twirling and drinking and dancing and crying for about an hour, before our friends stopped by and danced with us, the four of us suddenly realizing where the real party was.
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E.R. Pulgar is Alt-Citizen’s “Of Poets + Punks” columnist. In this monthly column, he will explore the relationship between music, emotion, and language. His music and culture writing has been featured in i-D, Remezcla, Billboard, and elsewhere. He is working on his debut collection, a long poem about water.
